• Link to the blogs and place them on the search engines or platforms where they can have greater visibility. Each person who reads us, protects us, so we need to strengthen the shield formed by readers and commentators.
• Spread the contents of the blogs, especially to the interior of Cuba. This can be done by sending our posts to friends and relatives on the Island, to share with them the opinions that come from right here, but which are not disclosed in the official media.
• Invite alternative bloggers to participate in events, whether virtual or real. This can be done through voice recordings, home made videos or telephone calls that help spread their opinions.
• Lend a hand in the administration of blogs, especially to those bloggers who have very limited access to the Internet. For this you only need the will to collaborate, a minimal understanding of WordPress or Blogger.com and the honesty to not add or change any content that has been authorized by the author of the site.
• Avoid the cult of personality of a single emblematic blogger and take the alternative blogosphere as a phenomenon in which a growing number of Cubans are participating. Don’t repeat in the virtual world the adoration of individuals that does so much damage in the real world.

To see rest of the list, check out the whole article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yoani-sanchez/how-huff-post-readers-can_b_208928.html

In many places of the world, Iran and Guatemala for example, people have been arrested because of their comments on Twitter or in their blogs.

An Iranian-Canadian blogger Hossein Derakhshan was arrested last November and charged with spying for Israel. He is concidered the Blogfather of Iran. Check out this article: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/blogger-and-aid-worker-still-held-in-iran/#more-12899

Secondly, he states that Twitter, Facebook and blogs are great tools that should be combined together.

“How could I have gotten past the first sentence in writing my thoughts here if I had to rely just on Twitter? Or Facebook?”, he asks.

See the article: http://dancody.org/archives/eugene-kane-questions-the-relevancy-of-blogs-i-question-his-understanding-of-the-medium-while-making-a-small-wager.html

Thanks to the invention of telegraph and telephone, it became more easier for people to distribute more widely to the news.

When moving to the 20th century, there have been many occasions where citizens have distributed the world with their unique footages. Including president John F. Kennedy’s assassination video, recorded by a garment manufacturer and an amateur cameraman Abraham Zapruder.

Also footage of LAPD officers beating Rodney King in LA in 1991. The incident was filmed by a bystander George Holliday. Some of the footage was aired by new agencies around the world and caused public outrage and raised tentions between social inequalities in the African-American community. King got $3.8 million from the civil case and used some of the proceeds to start a hip hop label.

The rise of World Wide Web in the 90s gave the opportunity for everyone to share their thoughts through their personal homepages.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, citizen journalism saw a huge growth. People started writing about what they had seen and what they felt.

Popular political blogger Glenn Reynolds, the writer of Instapundit, rose to great influence after 9/11.

War in Iraq, tsunami and flooding in Southeast Asia and hurricanes Katrine and Rita – all these events have been covered by ordinary citizens.

And not only ordinary people say their word. Also influential people have started giving their oppionion directly to the public.

Check out the whole article: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/09/your-guide-to-citizen-journalism270.html

AfricaNews aims to create an online community that shares news, photos, weblogs, videos, mobile reports and untold stories by African people. The topics it focuses on are Business, Microfinance, Society, Culture, Travel, Nature, Music and Sport.

Africa Interactive offers tools such as video cameras, mobile phones, and computers to webloggers, writers, citizen journalists, photographers and filmmakers, in order to enable everyone to contribute to the AfricaNews network. Whether it be in text, photo or video, regular citizens can become reporters with the tools they are given and encouraged to use. 

What a great initiative…

CJP has two websites, J-source.ca (English) and ProjectJ.ca (French). These are projects of The Canadian Journalism Foundation in collaboration with journalism schools and organizations across the country.

The goal at CJP is “to enable a national conversation about the achievement of, and challenges to, excellence in Canadian journalism and provide a convenient and trustworthy source of information and commentary. The site provides a source for news, research, commentary, advice, discussion and resources. It also includes links to other organizations that recognize and support excellence in journalism.”

Recent articles on J-source.ca have discussed the issues of citizen journalism and the rise of the blogosphere. It’s a hot subject in Canada. Thanks to the platform created by The Canadian Journalism Project,  professional journalists, students and citizen journalists alike can debate on the future of media on a common blog.

1. Enterprise (a controversial, well-researched and carefully written & edited story) 

2. Accuracy 

3. Watchdog Role (Reporters should be a check on government) 

4. Quote regular people (As opposed to just quoting official spokespeople. Blogging is a great way to increase contact with regular folks) 

5. Careful editing

6. Quality

7. Impartiality ( To a certain extent. It’s good to express an opinion about an issue, but when comes the time to write a news story, impartiality is crucial. Opinion-writing is more appropriate for analyzing or criticizing news) 

(Source: http://savethemedia.com/2009/03/29/old-journalism-standards-that-should-remain/) 

The online survey was conducted among a random sample of North American reporters and editors, and was focused on understanding how social media and blogs influence their work.

“While only a small percentage of journalists feel that blogs are helpful in generating sources or exclusives, they do see blogs as particularly useful in helping them better understand the context of a story, a new story angle, or a new story idea. It appears that reporters are using blogs more for ethnographic research than they are for investigative research”. 

A few interesting points were brought up in the survey results: 

“Blogs are a regular source for US  journalists. Over three quarters of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue.

Nearly 70% of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis. Over one in five (20.9%) reporters said they spend over an hour per day reading blogs. And a total of nearly three in five (57.1%) reporters said they read blogs at least two to three times a week.

Journalists in the US are increasingly active participants in the blogosphere. One in four reporters (27.7%) have their own blogs and nearly one in five (16.3%) have their own social networking page. About half of reporters (47.5%) say they are “lurkers” – reading blogs but rarely commenting.

The majority of journalists in the US thought blogs were having a significant impact on news reporting in all areas tested EXCEPT in the area of news quality. The biggest impact has been in speed and availability of news. Over half said that blogs were having a significant impact on the “tone” (61.8%) and “editorial direction” (51.1%) of news reporting.”

Overall,  American journalists are still using traditional reporting methods to write their stories. But they are becoming more aware of and more interested by the blogosphere. 

As the study results have shown, in the US, “the blogosphere’s tail is not wagging the media body – at least not yet”. 

(Source: http://takingtheblogosphereseriously.com/category/results/)

“When Friedland thinks about what might fill the gap created by declining newspapers, he imagines an online newspaper characterized by a “layered journalism.” Layered journalism combines professional and citizen journalism through the creative use of new media. The newsroom staff would have several layers, starting at the “top” with traditional managing editors and some professional journalists and editors. There might also be new types of editors who act more like producers. They would go out into the community to encourage and to train people to tell their stories. 

The newsroom would also contain paid citizen journalists for serious news stories. 
By paid citizen journalists, Friedland means ordinary citizens from around the world who are not professionally trained in journalism yet are willing to do news reporting according to the style and rules of traditional news journalism. The professional journalists in the newsroom would make sure that the paid citizen journalists followed rules for impartiality, accuracy, and fairness. Eventually, these citizen journalists would come to resemble freelance reporters. In addition, the online newspaper would contain stories from unpaid citizen journalists who are free to comment on and write about what engages them, with fewer ethical rules to follow.”

This “layered” model entails serious implications. How can different standards of writing and reporting be attributed to writers for a single publication, and how can different methods of payment be distributed to both professional and citizen journalists? 

With these issues aside however, layered journalism could increase democratic standards for newspapers worldwide. If regular citizens (not including professional journalists) also have a say in the news, there might be less room for bias interpretations and corruption in the newsroom. 

It’s a venue that is worth exploring…

To view the article:

http://www.j-source.ca/english_new/detail.php?id=3497